


Feral Instincts

by xxSparksxx



Category: Poldark (TV 2015), Poldark - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Getting to Know Each Other, Past Abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-19
Updated: 2019-06-19
Packaged: 2020-05-14 22:31:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19282510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xxSparksxx/pseuds/xxSparksxx
Summary: The first time Ross shouts at Demelza, she flinches away from him, a hand raised as if to fend off a blow.





	Feral Instincts

**Author's Note:**

> From a prompt on tumblr: “I’m sorry I yelled at you…”. Set in the early days of Demelza's employment at Nampara. There is reference and response to her childhood abuse, but nothing explicit.
> 
> My usual beta is busy with Life Stuff at the moment, so this lacks a beta. Forgive any typos I may have missed.

The first time Ross shouts at Demelza, she flinches away from him, a hand raised as if to fend off a blow.

It’s a fortnight since she arrived, and she’s skittish still, not yet settled into Nampara. Cleaner than she was, and more neatly dressed, she still bears more than a passing resemblance to a hunted animal. She can and does hold her own against Jud and Prudie – especially Jud – but with Ross she seems more cautious, more wary. She watches him out of the corner of her eyes whenever they’re in the same room. She keeps a careful distance between them. 

It disquiets him, though he can’t put his finger on the reason why he should be so disturbed. Perhaps it’s because he already knows her to be fierce and quick-witted. He knows she’s unafraid of flinging herself into a dogfight to save her mongrel puppy. He’s heard her snap retorts to Jud’s insults, cleverer than Jud by a long shot, even without any kind of schooling. It’s a base intelligence; a kind of sharp-tongued, brittle-edged defence against someone older and bigger and stronger. But a defence it is, one that proves her mettle, and it belies the caution with which she treats Ross. 

No, he does not like the subdued little waif who reappears when he enters a room or joins a conversation. She’s much more lively with Jud and Prudie, much more responsive, which is partly why he’s enlisted Prudie on his quest to get Demelza clean and keep her that way. Prudie is likely to take advantage of Demelza’s presence, and do less work as a result, but she’s less likely than Jud to insult the girl, and they are, after all, the only two women in Nampara. Ross supposes there may be some bond in that, perhaps enough to settle Demelza further into her life here. He hopes so; he would like to see her more confident in her position here, more confident in herself.

But it isn’t until the first time he shouts at her that he realises, truly realises, why her skittish behaviour makes him so unsettled. 

It all comes about because of the wretched dog, as perhaps Ross should have predicted. It was the dog, after all, that had led the child into his life in the first place. Flea-ridden, filthy and gangly, the pair of them – at least at first. He’s held a firm line on cleanliness, which is helping to reduce the girl’s lice, and he’s banished Garrick from the house until Demelza can prove to him that he, likewise, no longer harbours ‘crawlers’. Any hope he’d had that she might give up the battle has been ebbing away as each day she dutifully scrubs herself, under Prudie’s supervision, and then proceeds to mete out the same treatment to her dog. Her attachment to the creature is, Ross suspects, unshakeable. She wants him to be allowed inside, and Ross has laid down rules on cleanliness, and so she washes the mongrel puppy every day to achieve her aim. He can’t be sure that she understands his edict, but at least she seems content enough to obey him for now.

But Garrick has no such discipline, and he seeks his mistress inside the house as well as out, which is how Ross comes to shout at Demelza: Garrick finds his way into the kitchen and breaks two glasses in his excitement. Ross hears the smash from the library, as well as Garrick’s loud barks, and he discovers Demelza on her knees trying to clean up the shards of glass while the dog cavorts around her, heedless of the danger to his paws.

“What in God’s name?” Ross exclaims. Then: “I told you to keep that wretched animal outside!” He crosses the room and seizes the dog by the scruff of its neck. The back door is open; he doesn’t go so far as to throw Garrick out, but he drops the dog unceremoniously on the step before shutting the door firmly. Demelza is still kneeling on the floor, but she’s stopped trying to clear up the mess. Instead she’s watching him with that odd, cautious alertness. He’s too angry to pay much attention to it. 

It isn’t just the waste of the glasses, and it isn’t just disapproval of her disobedience in allowing the dog inside, though neither fact has helped. The truth is that he’s been in a foul mood since he woke up. His head is pounding, because he drank too much last night, and he’d been doing battle with his accounts, trying to stretch pounds into guineas and failing miserably. The disturbance in the kitchen had come just at the moment when he felt he was beginning to see a way through for at least the rest of the year, if the weather stays his friend and the crops do well, and he wasn’t – isn’t – happy about being dragged away from it, especially for something like this.

And Prudie is nowhere to be seen, which most likely means Jud isn’t at his work, either. Their laziness makes his blood boil. It isn’t fair for them to leave Demelza to try to manage alone, not when she’s so new to the work. She’s willing enough, he knows, but she needs instruction and supervision. Prudie should be providing that, and she should be making sure that Demelza obeys the few rules that Ross has laid down for his servants.

“If you can’t obey my instructions, you can’t stay here,” he snaps at the girl. “I won’t have fleas in my house!” Demelza says nothing, just sits and stares at him, her eyes wide. “Do you hear?” he demands. “If you can’t obey, you can just pack your things and go back to your father!” There’s a cut on her hand, he sees – just a small one, but there’s fresh blood smeared across a finger. He strides towards her, grasping her elbow and pulling her to her feet. Her shoes are ill-fitting and nearly worn through, she’ll be better off if he cleans up the glass while she tends to her cut – but Demelza flinches, violently, before he can voice the thought. She flinches, trying to pull out of his grasp, and raises her other arm, holding it as if to deflect a blow aimed at her head.

She flinches. 

Several pieces of information suddenly fall into place in Ross’s mind and, feeling suddenly sick to his stomach, he lets go of her abruptly. To give her credit, Demelza doesn’t take the opportunity to get out of his reach; instead she wraps her arms around her middle and mutters something about it being an accident, that she can’t have shut the kitchen door properly. There’s a mutinous look about her, a certain set of her jaw that gives Ross some indication that she wouldn’t just meekly submit to whatever punishment he might give her – whatever punishment she thinks he might give her – and, after a long moment of silence, she does shuffle backwards a little, away from him. Not quite far enough to be out of reach, but a little further away, at least.

It all makes him even angrier. He’s angry with her, because he feels, irrationally, that she should know him better. But mostly he’s angry with himself, because now, looking back over the past fortnight, he finds himself confronted with an unpleasant truth: that nothing in his behaviour, in his conversations with her, might lead Demelza to understand that he will never, ever strike her in anger. The girl had been here only a day before she’d seen him brawling with her father, after all, and he frequently threatens to whip Jud. He’s been as kind as he can be to Demelza, but it’s clearly not been enough to prove to her that he will never hit her as a punishment. And though she’s not cowering away from him now, not precisely, still it’s abundantly clear that the reason she’s been so wary of him is that he’s given her little enough cause to be otherwise.

She takes another step back. Glass crunches underfoot, and she hisses through her teeth – the glass must have penetrated her inadequate shoe. It makes him brusque, hearing that little sound of pain. 

“Get out, before you hurt yourself worse,” he tells her. She opens her mouth – to protest, perhaps – but he snarls and gestures at the door. “Go on, go. And make sure that damned dog stays out of the kitchen!”

Perhaps it’s the anger in his voice, perhaps it’s something in his expression. Either way, it makes Demelza turn tail and retreat out of the kitchen, the back door closing behind her quietly. Her arrival outside is greeted with a volley of barks. Ross raises his eyes skywards for a moment and takes a deep breath. He’d known he must take in the mutt when he’d taken in the girl; there’s no use letting himself get worked up about it now. What’s done is done – and that includes the broken glasses, which were, at least, some of the oldest in the house. Old and cheap and easy enough to replace, next time he’s in Sawle or Truro. It’s not as if the dog has broken some precious heirloom. Yes, the girl should have kept the dog out of the kitchen, but he’s seen for himself how determined Garrick can be, in pursuit of his mistress. He can’t really blame her for it. Or he shouldn’t, anyway. Really, there’s no justification in this accident for his flash of temper. 

Regardless, her reaction has disturbed him and, as he carefully gathers the shards of glass together, he berates himself once again for not making it clear to Demelza that any punishments, here, will be more along the lines of docked wages or forfeited treats. He’d brought her here in large part because the idea of a grown man striking a child had revolted him. Threatening to whip Jud – even doing so – is a far different thing to striking a child. 

But Demelza is new here. She has not yet fully found her feet in Nampara, in this new situation she has been thrust into, and it’s Ross’s responsibility to make sure she isn’t afraid of him, not hers to overcome a rational, learned response to a man’s ire.

He puts the shards of glass in the rubbish pail and thinks carefully about what he should say to the child. Words are not his strong point, but the situation can’t stand. He doesn’t mind Jud thinking his threats of violence have substance, because Jud is a lazy drunkard who deserves a good whipping for some of the things he does and says. Demelza is another matter entirely. He won’t have her continuing to jump at shadows whenever he’s around, afraid that he’ll turn out to be just like her father after all. He won’t have it.

When he goes out into the farm yard, he finds her by the chicken coops, gathering eggs in her apron. He feels a flicker of approval at that; she’s still working, even though she feared a beating from him. Jud and Prudie both make themselves scarce when they’ve been admonished, though if either of them had an ounce of sense, they’d know it would only make him angrier. Demelza, though, has found herself another task, and it pleases him. 

He carefully makes noise as he approaches her, to keep her from startling, and though it works, it’s disheartening to see that wary, cautious look creeping across her face as she straightens and turns to face him. He stops before he gets within arm’s reach, though he hopes that she wouldn’t just stand and take a blow, not out here, with clear and easy escape routes. It had been different in the kitchen, he tells himself. Closed in with four walls around them, no doubt Demelza had felt more cornered, more like an animal in a trap, with no way out and nothing to do but accept what came to her. The thought makes him feel nauseous again.

He begins abruptly. “I’m sorry I shouted at you.” Her eyes are a little red, as if she’s been crying, and now they open very wide as she looks at him. Perhaps nobody has ever apologised to her before. Uncomfortable, he continues. “I have a temper,” he says. “I dislike being crossed. I won’t allow dirty dogs in my house, and you’ve been told that.”

“I did shut the door,” she protests, life sparking into existence as she lifts her chin a little. It’s a sign of defiance, and he’s somewhat relieved to see it. “But he must’ve jumped an’ caught the latch. ‘E didn’t mean to break them glasses, sir, honest, an’ – an’ you can take the cost of ‘em from my wages, an’ –,”

“Forget about the glasses, Demelza,” Ross interrupts, and she subsides. He tries to think what to say next, how to explain to her that he knows it was an accident – how to say that half his temper had been impatience from seeing how careless she was of being hurt by the broken glass. But words fail him, as they so often do. It doesn’t matter, anyway. The important thing is to make sure she understands that she will face no violence here. “My bark is worse than my bite,” he says at last. 

“Sir?”

“I might shout at you,” he rephrases, “but I won’t hurt you. Nobody here will hurt you, child. You have my word.”

She sniffs, and he has the distinct impression that if she had a free hand, she would wipe her nose on her sleeve. “M’not a child,” she mutters. She doesn’t deny her fear. He clasps his hands behind his back and waits her out. She’s a funny thing, this little piece of flotsam he’s brought into his home. He hopes she’ll grow happier once this new information has bedded down in her mind; what little he knows of her so far suggests a great thirst for life. He wants the cautious little waif to be erased by the bolder, strong-minded girl he’s seen her to be.

She sniffs again. “I didn’t really think ee would,” she says, an outright lie that he doesn’t comment on. “An’ – an’ I’m washin’ Garrick, sir, every day, like ee said.”

“So I’ve seen,” Ross says gravely. “Well, when he’s properly clean, we’ll revisit the issue. But for now, just remember what I said. Nobody will hit you here – and if anybody does, I’ll handle them the way I did your father.”

Demelza smiles suddenly, bright and brilliant. He’s startled by how much it transforms her, her features rearranged into lively prettiness by the smile and the spark in her eyes. 

“Yes, sir,” she agrees. “I’ll remember.” She fidgets with her apron and ducks her head. “Thank ee, sir.”

“Never mind that,” he says, clearing his throat, uncomfortable with thanks for something that he should have made clear from the beginning. “Finish collecting the eggs, then put the kettle on for some tea. And find where Prudie’s hidden herself away, will you? Dinner will be late if she doesn’t stir herself.” 

Demelza’s smile turns conspiratorial for a moment, and he finds himself returning it. Good, he thinks. Good. She could do with smiling more, and he could do with someone more cheerful in the house. She won’t just take his word for it, of course; it will take time to unlearn the instinctive responses that life as her father’s daughter has taught her.

But it’s a start, at least. It’s a start.


End file.
